CloudViewer: a Web-Based Viewer for Massive Aerial Point Clouds
""Minor 3D Virtual Earth" students bring super-large 3D point clouds to the public via the web"
- Students: Sjoerd Huininga (3ME), Monica Zeestraten (LR), Jasper de Lange (3ME) and Lars Wijtemans (EWI)
Researchers: Gerwin de Haan (EWI), Hugo Ledoux (BK-OTB)
Extra Help: Lars Wijtemans (EWI student, currently working on the 3di Watermanagement project)
Please use this link when referring to this project: http://graphics.tudelft.nl/cloudviewer
Inquiries: Gerwin de Haan (EWI)
Experience CloudViewer
See the public Cloudviewer beta in live action:
New! The Kop van Zuid area, Rotterdam
Delft, the city, the campus and its surroundings
(ps. you'll need a modern browser such as Internet Explorer 8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
Our TUDelft Cloudviewer allows 3D exploration of large point clouds via the web. We first pre-process source 3D point clouds and photography for use in a real-time 3D rendering engine (e.g. this video ). After that, we script a virtual camera to generate tens of thousands oblique (or "birds-eye") image tiles for various zoom-levels and view angles. Finally, these resulting tiles are placed on a web server so they can be shown as a layer in Google Maps. We believe we are the first to extensively tweak the Google Maps web-mapping interface to allow oblique viewing angles and rotating view orientation with custom data. This makes the exploration of 3D point clouds almost as impressive as on TU Delft's high-end 3D visualization systems, but now over the web for everyone to enjoy!
Description
For the second year in a row, the TU Delft minor "3D Virtual Earth" (3DVE) attracted students from different faculties interested in 3D geo-infomation, web technologies and visualisation. For the final projects of the minor, they had to build "their own 3D Earth model application". Students Sjoerd Huininga (3ME), Monica Zeestraten (LR), Jasper de Lange (3ME) and Lars Wijtemans (EWI) built a 3D web-based viewer for exploring massive point clouds, such as the AHN2 dataset (Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland---an elevation model covering the whole of the Netherlands). This application permits us to have an oblique view on the model, and even to generate on-the-fly movies of a given building or area.
In The News
25 May 2011 - Google Maps Mania